Ritter-Guth, Beth

Beth Ritter-Guth’s contributions to the Hurricane Sandy Relief Team began at 1 a.m. on Nov. 1. She received a "tweet" from President McMenamin. Ms. Ritter-Guth recalls the president’s message vividly: "We need a plan for restoring our classes through the online ANGEL shell in case the College will need to close for an extended period of time." As the director of instructional design, Ms. Ritter-Guth enlisted what she called the "fabulous" ANGEL support team to provide direct access from the Owl’s Nest portal to the ANGEL course-management system. This resulted in the creation of the now famous "Hurricane Sandy ANGEL Shell" which enabled faculty who were not already using ANGEL to post course content for their students. Over the course of two days in the Elizabeth Command Center, Ms. Ritter-Guth worked with faculty to post their content into this shell. Throughout the weekend, as she continued receiving materials from faculty, Ms. Ritter-Guth worked to post hundreds of courses so that by Mon., Nov. 5 more than 93 percent of all faculty had their courses available to students through the online shell. Two days later, every course was posted. She says of faculty, "They were simply magnificent." The rest of us say that Ms. Ritter-Guth was magnificent too.